The finest moment in Barack Obama’s transcendent speech on race yesterday was probably when he evoked his grandmother. For those of you who missed it, take time and watch it with your children later. But let me quote from the man himself (and the fact that he actually wrote most of this speech himself means we stand to elect, if nothing else, a great writer to the White House). The set-up, of course, was the flack he’s been getting for statements made by his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who critics have asked him to disown:

“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” he said. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

“These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”

We all have one of those grandmas, somebody in our family or in our past who loved us and let us down with their prejudices and their attitudes. It’s not a black thing or a white thing; it’s a human thing. Obama is not counting merely on the subtlety of his argument that black men of Wright’s generation might be entitled to some anti-American feelings (fear of black rage is something Republicans are dying to pounce on); he’s counting on our common, flawed humanity, and that enough voters of all races will recognize themselves, and their larger families, in his dilemma.

Was the speech too lofty for Joe Sixpack? Can’t tell yet. It’s probably not the kind of speech that is going to push him past Hillary in parts of Pennsylvania (of which longtime Clinton supporter James Carville famously said, “It’s Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between”) but I really think he was speaking more to the superdelegates, who represent not only Hillary’s only hope but who are also super-Democrats themselves, men and women who drank the Kool-Aid of our party — the ideals and, yes, the idealism — a long time ago.

There were a lot of ways Obama could have tackled the Wright problem, which Fox News and other hate mongers are determined to keep alive. He could have ignored it, he could have repudiated him and everything he stands for. Instead he gambled with a reaction that was complicated and intelligent and emotional, all at once, as if inviting us as voters and Americans to join him on a higher playing field. Do we have the guts to go there?